For the second time in as many days, Saudi Arabia has reported a new MERS-CoV (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus) case after a month-long hiatus, its Ministry of Health (MOH) said today.
Officials reported more than 62,000 new chikungunya cases in the Caribbean and surrounding areas last week—almost all in the Dominican Republic—expanding the outbreak to 576,000 cases, according to an Aug 8 update from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).
An enhanced system of surveillance for MERS-CoV in England turned up 2 cases of the disease among 77 potential candidates meeting case definitions in its first year of operation, according to a dispatch yesteday in Emerging Infectious Diseases. The numbers are small, say the authors, but in the context of emerging pathogens, reporting data like theirs can help optimize case detection and surveillance systems.
Significantly fewer infectious organisms are transferred through a fist bump than through a handshake or even a "high five," so fist bumps would be a more hygienic way of greeting others, says a study from the United Kingdom released today in the American Journal of Infection Control, the journal of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).
New York's Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is not required to hold public hearings on the safety of feeding antibiotics at subtherapeutic levels to food animals, a decision that advocates called a blow to public health, Food Safety News (FSN) reported today.
A 67-year-old Iranian woman died of MERS on Jun 25, , the WHO said, marking the country's second fatal case.
The findings raise the possibility of airborne spread, but an expert called them preliminary.
Researchers who analyzed the genome of a new coronavirus (CoV) from a South African bat sample demonstrated that it may be the ancestor of MERS-CoV, that a host switch from bats to camels may have taken place in Africa, and that camels are likely infecting humans rather than vice versa, according to a study yesterday in the Journal of Virology.
The WHO filled in details on 7 recently reported cases in Saudi Arabia and 2 in the UAE.
UAE's 2 new cases are the first reported there since mid-June.
